But Now I See [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. I discovered healing for Shane by the grace of God. I discovered that the Christian life is not 99% grace and then 1% of it's all my effort to be a good person.

I discovered it's Jesus and Jesus alone. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series Unlimited as presented at Rinaldo Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I'm going to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special author. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Now, more on this later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. Are you ready for some good news? Anyone can change, and there is no limit to how much a person can change. Anyone can change. And there's no limit to how much a person can change.

We're going to learn that from one of the greatest transformation stories in the history of the world. Saul of Tarsus, who we know as the Apostle Paul. His conversion story, we pick up in Acts chapter nine in our ongoing series on the book of Acts.

Unlimited is the name of the series, and today we see the unlimited power of the Holy Spirit to change someone's life. Acts chapter nine, verse one. But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus so that if he found any belonging to the way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus and suddenly a light, a bright, glorious light just from heaven just flashed around him. And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, who are you, Lord?

And he said, I'm Jesus whom you are persecuting, but rise and enter the city and you'll be told what you're to do. And the men who are traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice, but seeing no one. Saul rose from the ground and although his eyes were opened, he saw nothing. So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.

And for three days he was without sight and neither ate nor drank. Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias, and the Lord said to him in a vision, Ananias, and he said, here I am, Lord. And Lord said to him, rise and go to the street called straight. And at the house of Judas, look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. For behold, he is praying and he is seen in a vision, a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight. But Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he's done to your saints at Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priest to bind all who call on your name. But the Lord said to him, go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel.

For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name. So Ananias departed and entered the house and laying his hands on him. He said, brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized.

And taking food, he was strengthened. I always chuckle about the man who had been so inattentive to his wife. He had become a workaholic. He was not taking care of himself or anyone else. He was not showing affection to his wife, to his family.

He was absent. And one day at work, that just was something happened to his heart and he felt himself to be a changed man. And so he left work early that day, went by, bought a new suit of clothing, put it on, went and bought two dozen roses for his wife and came home to surprise her, rang the front doorbell. And she opened it up and she saw him. She burst into tears. And he said, well, why are you crying? She said, it's been a terrible day. She said, the dishwasher broke. It flooded the kitchen. The kids have been completely unruly. I got a backache and a headache.

And now to top it off, you come home drunk. Well, a leopard can't change his spots. We say, you know, people, it can't change.

You know, it's tricky thing because like as a head of staff and we've got a lot of employees, you know, somebody said, well, what would you look for in hiring somebody? I said, well, past performance is the best indicator of future performance. You know, I mean, that's true. And we know we look around and so I go, boy, people don't seem to change that much. And so we can start thinking, well, people really just can't change. Well, today's story proves that absolutely wrong because you just can't have a bigger transformation than Saul of Tarsus who hated Jesus and hated the people of God who became one who loved Jesus and loved people so much that he would give up his life for them. So you can't read this story without saying, if God could change Saul of Tarsus, he could change anybody. Anyone by the power of the Holy Spirit can change. And I've seen it.

And there's no limit to how much someone changes when the scales fall off their spiritual eyes and they see truth. It's a glorious story and it's empowering to us all because we all have our own story to tell. You know, I always kind of felt like I don't have a very dramatic testimony. I was kind of a good kid. I was often the teacher's pet.

I tried to do what people said. I was more of a conformist. And so I always kind of wish I'd had one of those dramatic testimonies, you know, like I was a drug addict and a member of Hell's Angels. And one day I was on my motorcycle and a blinding light came down and in an instant I was cured of drug addiction to three different drugs. And then I became a Christian. It's not my story.

I was more of a goody two shoes. To my knowledge, I've never even been drunk. I don't know. I've never even drunk in the Holy Spirit, but I don't know.

I don't know. I don't really think we've ever been drunk. And I've only had half a cigarette. I was 11. And the kid up the street said, here I got one. I took a couple of puffs on that thing. I about got sick.

And so that was the end of me and cigarettes. And never did cuss really. You know, my dad didn't cuss.

Nobody in my family cuss. So I just didn't drink, cuss or smoke. And my mom, when I was in fourth grade, she accepted Christ. And then she told me about Jesus and I thought he sounded great and I accepted Christ. And I just tried to live a Christian life from that time on. And in high school, there was a Christian group on campus, Young Life. And I got into a small group, a campaigner group, got discipled there, grew in the Lord.

When I got to college, I had some intellectual struggles. There's a story there. But then I got into a great Bible study and a great group at college. I grew in the Lord.

I got called to the ministry and, you know, experienced more God in here I am. And so there's the story. And it's not dramatic. My wife though, my story is dramatic compared to my wife. She's got the least dramatic testimony of anybody I've ever hung. My wife does not remember a time that she does not love Jesus. Now I do know for sure she is born again. I was just nobody knows when it happened. I think she might have been two, maybe one.

I don't know. You know, she just, I mean, she had her little spirit just love Jesus from the time she could. My wife is so crazy.

This is the only person in the history world this has happened to. But when she was little and the other girls would be play acting like I'm going to be the doctor or the nurse or I'm going to be such and such wife. She actually, when she was a little girl, pretended and play acted that she was the pastor's wife. Who does that? Who does that? What, what kindergartners like going around pretending to be the pastor's wife.

What is it? She is so naive. When I got married to her, I realized she was just so naive. She just, you know, not only had she never been drunk, she just didn't even know what the thing looked like. She just like, I mean, I don't know how we got, we, we, we got a free trip that she'd won.

It's a different story. So our honeymoon was to New Orleans. And one night in New Orleans, we walked, I took her, we walked halfway down Bourbon Street, halfway down Bourbon Street at night is as far as any Christian should ever go. And so, and maybe not even halfway, but we walked down halfway down Bourbon Street and in front of one of the bars, there was a man that was passed out on the sidewalk and I was just kind of like stepping over him, you know, and she was like, there's something wrong with that man. I said, yeah, there's something wrong with that man. She said, you need to do something. She, she thought I needed to do CPR on him or something.

And I had to call some, some medical help or something. I said, no, no, honey. I said, the man is just drunk and passed out. She said, how do you, how do you know?

And I said, it's Bourbon Street and he's in front of a bar. That's how I know. So you got the least dramatic testimony of anybody I've ever known in my life. You know, just never, I just love Jesus from the beginning. You know, here's the thing. I always kind of wanted one of those cool dramatic testimonies, but then when I had kids, I realized I do not want them to have a dramatic testimony. The testimony I want for them is that I came to Jesus when I was about two or three, and then I grew in wisdom, stature, and favor with God and man all the days of my life. That's just the mark of a Christian that I want to have on every child and youth in this church.

Guess what? You don't have to sow your wild oats. No, you don't have to have a season of rebellion. No, you don't have to run away from God in order to come back to Him.

No, you don't have to do all of that. You don't have to waste your youth in riotous living. You don't have to do foolish things and waste time in your life. You can get up with God and grow up in God and just get an early start on everybody else while everybody else is wasting their time. You can just be growing in maturity. That's the testimony I want for my kids and every kid in this church.

So praise the Lord that I don't have a dramatic testimony. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. If ever we've been ready for a new year, this is the year. As you start planning and dreaming for a great new year, we want to help.

Alan Wright Ministries has produced a beautiful, inspiring wall calendar with you in mind. Each month not only depicts the month in a heart-stirring image, but also includes a specially crafted blessing for the month from Pastor Alan. As Pastor Alan explains in his new book, The Power to Bless, which releases February 2nd and is available from Amazon for pre-order now, blessing is a biblically based faith vision over your life.

God blessed Adam and Eve and then told them to be fruitful and multiply. Blessing isn't the reward for your productivity, it's the fuel for it. The 2021 blessing wall calendar gives you space to write down all your important appointments and make plans for a wonderful new year. And most importantly, each time you see the beautiful image for the month, your heart will be strengthened by the empowering blessing statement from Pastor Alan. This year, don't just organize your life, bless your life with the 2021 blessing calendar. It is our gift to you when you make a donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. Contact us today and start your year out right by the power of blessing. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. If you look inside your story, you will find something that has a point of great and deep connection with somebody. So there is something dramatic in my story and it is. Though I didn't drink smoke or cuss, that I had a drivenness in me that was rooted. I didn't know it until I was grown in the Lord and had been ministering as a pastor for nine years.

I didn't know it. It was something called shame. A feeling that I don't quite measure up and that I need to perform in order to be acceptable.

And it is an anxiety producing, unfulfilling way to live. And I discovered healing for shame by the grace of God. I discovered that the Christian life is not 99% grace and then 1% of it's all my effort to be a good person.

I discovered it's Jesus and Jesus alone. And I found out that I was accepted in the beloved. And I made a transition by the power of the Holy Ghost to just become a person who lives not perfectly, but lives by grace. You see, I moved from performance based living. If I do well in others eyes, I will be accepted. So I'll try hard. I moved from that to I'll try hard because I'm already accepted in Christ and I know I can make a difference in the world.

Now that may not look much different from the outside, but from the inside it's everything. And by the grace of God, I wrote that story down in a book originally called Shame Off You called Free Yourself, Be Yourself Now. And we started doing conferences, which we've been doing for 12 years or more all around the nation. And you know, I thought the Lord would use the book to maybe relate to other people like me, you know, the straight A student and the conformist and all that. But what I realized is he also could use my story to relate to people who outwardly might look very different than me because shame is shame and grace is grace and we all need the same thing.

Years ago, some of you might even been here. Hilda was here in this church. Here she is with her grandbabies. Now, I wish I could take time to give you her whole story. She's written it down in about five pages, but let me tell you in short what happened with Hilda. By her own admission, she was the most ornery, the meanest inmate in the Coleman County Jail. She had been in the prison system in and out most of her adult life. Her story, like so many, is one in which she had been brought up under abuse and alcoholic relatives and she wound up just being full of anger. She said in the jail, the other women were scared of her. She beat them up without thinking.

There's a group, a church led by Pastor Bobby Hill in Coleman, Alabama that took that book that I wrote and the workbook we put together and they took it into the jail and the sheriff liked the results and said, you can do as much of this as you want. So they went in and were teaching the gospel through this material on the healing of shame and they did it for years. Hilda was mad at God and mad at religion and they kept inviting her to join one of the women's groups. Eventually, she came and sat around the back, around the outside of the group and just sat there mad. Eventually, though, she thought these people really are loving. Like, I've never seen this kind of love and she inched up and got part of the discussion. I think it was after a discussion of a chapter called For the Want of a Mom and Dad that's about how much shame we feel when we haven't had healthy parents and how much we need a mom and a dad. And she said that she got away and she just started crying before God and she said, God, I am so tired of being disappointed and so mad and I'm just going to say this to you.

If you're real, I need you to show me. And she just had it out with God. The next morning, she said she was in the restroom and another inmate was next to her and said, Hilda, what's different about you? And Hilda said, what? And the lady who normally would've been scared of Hilda said, you're smiling.

And Hilda said she looked in the mirror and she saw herself smiling and couldn't believe it. Hilda went on to not only come to Christ and be nurtured by that pastor and that group, but she went through that book and that workbook so many times that she herself became a facilitator of women's groups in the jail and continued to do so for years. She was released for a weekend when I was speaking in Alabama one time. The sheriff said she had such good behavior.

He just let her go for the weekend and she came and I met her. Later, she got parole early because everybody's like, why is this woman? She was working in the sheriff's office by that time. She was leading people to Christ and helping addicts get off drugs and she was leading shame off your groups. And so they gave her early parole and she wrote me an email and she said, I just want you to know I was paroled today. And she just wrote one other sentence. She said, but God set me free long before I was set free.

Isn't that strange? Her story on the outside looks way different than my story, but it was the same story. The move from shame to grace. I wish I could introduce you to Jessica who has a very similar story. Jessica was on the streets of Kansas City and in the sex industry in Kansas City. And she was invited into a church and a particular small group in a church in Kansas City that began reaching out to her. All these ladies in this small group that were all these upper middle class and lovely ladies, they just loved Jessica and invited her in.

And we went to that church and did the shame off you conference. And on Friday night, Jessica came. She got so mad in the middle of that Friday night session that she stormed out and didn't come back the next day. But she kept going to that little Bible study group and they went through all that book and all the workbook and she sat there just mad, but she kept going.

Sometimes she'd storm out, but she'd come back the next week. Later, I asked her, I said, well, were you mad? Who are you mad at? She said, you. I said, why are you mad at me for writing that book and getting all down in my stuff? And I was like, I'm just writing a book about the grace of God.

Don't be mad at me. And somewhere in the middle of that study, there's a section about receiving and giving forgiveness and a story about a time we gave out a rose to every woman and said, it's a rose for a rose and I made a confession on behalf of men. When she got to that, something inside her got mad and then broke of all the men that had mistreated her. And Jessica accepted Christ, went back to that church three years later and did a conference. And Jessica had begun ministering with a ministry that helps women off the street called Veronica's Voice.

And she had been leading shame off you groups amongst those women. And I think she knew the book better than I did. I would have had no idea, but my story that seems so non-dramatic is just non-dramatic from the way it looks on the outside. But what God does by His grace in the heart of every believer is miraculous. And you're a miracle too. Alan Wright, today's teaching. But now I see.

It's from the greater series from the book of Acts titled Unlimited. And Pastor Alan is back with us today here in just a few moments with our parting good news thought. Stick with us. If ever we've been ready for a new year, this is the year. As you start planning and dreaming for a great new year, we want to help.

Alan Wright Ministries has produced a beautiful inspiring wall calendar with you in mind. Each month not only depicts the month in a heart-stirring image, but also includes a specially crafted blessing for the month from Pastor Alan. As Pastor Alan explains in his new book, The Power to Bless, which releases February 2nd and is available from Amazon for pre-order now, blessing is a biblically based faith vision over your life. God blessed Adam and Eve and then told them to be fruitful and multiply. Blessing isn't the reward for your productivity.

It's the fuel for it. The 2021 blessing wall calendar gives you space to write down all your important appointments and make plans for a wonderful new year. And most importantly, each time you see the beautiful image for the month, your heart will be strengthened by the empowering blessing statement from Pastor Alan. This year, don't just organize your life, bless your life with the 2021 blessing calendar. It is our gift to you when you make a donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. Contact us today and start your year out right by the power of blessing. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Back now with Pastor Alan.

What's your parting good news thought for today as we place the bookmark here? But now I see if Saul of Tarsus, the greatest persecutor of Christians that the early church knew, Saul of Tarsus, who aligned everything in his life to be against Jesus. If Saul of Tarsus could change and be the apostle Paul, the great preacher of the gospel and writer of much of the New Testament, if Saul of Tarsus can change, anyone can. So if you're listening today and you wonder if God really could change your life, think about the apostle Paul, who once was breathing murderous threats, who once was completely opposed to God and God used him and God could use you. No matter your past, no matter what you're struggling with now, anyone, anyone can change by the grace of God. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.